Brian Dickerson: We're all at risk when some feel excluded from jury box

June 3, 2012

Detroit Free Press Columnist

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The price a community pays when some residents feel excluded from the jury box was brought home to me unforgettably on a Saturday night more than 30 years ago.

Just before dusk, I was waiting in line at a movie theater just north of Miami, Fla., where I'd recently accepted my first full-time reporting job, when a plume of smoke curled above the horizon. Curious, I left the line, found a phone booth, and called the city desk to ask where the fire was.

I never made it to the movies that weekend.

That single plume of smoke heralded the beginning of one of the deadliest race riots in U.S. history. By the time some semblance of order was restored three days later, 18 people had been killed, more than 800 had been arrested, and much of Miami's two largest African-American neighborhoods lay in smoldering ruins.

The spark that ignited Miami's firestorm had been struck in a federal courthouse across the state in Tampa, where an all-white jury had acquitted five white Dade County police officers of manslaughter in the death of an unarmed black motorcyclist named Arthur McDuffie.

Police originally claimed that McDuffie had died of injuries sustained when he crashed his motorcycle after a high-speed chase. But an autopsy report punctured that story, and officers who were given immunity eventually admitted that their colleagues had chased McDuffie from the crash scene, stripped his helmet off and beaten his head in after he tried to surrender. The medical examiner who challenged the initial police version of McDuffie's death said McDuffie's brain damage was the worst he'd encountered in 3,600 autopsies.

A judge in Miami had moved the trial of the accused police officers to Tampa on the theory that jurors there would be less likely to have encountered the extensive news coverage the case had generated in Miami and that black Miamians would have more confidence in a verdict reached hundreds of miles from the scene of the crime.

But Tampa's jury pool was even less diverse than Miami's, and when the change of venue facilitated a stunningly swift acquittal by an all-white jury, black Miami erupted with a ferocity unprecedented in the city's history.

Miami and Tampa are just two of countless U.S. cities where African Americans historically have been underrepresented on juries. And though much has changed since the early '80s, when black jurors who made it to the voir dire phase of a criminal trial were routinely excused by white prosecutors exercising peremptory challenges, efforts to make sure juries and jury pools include representative numbers of African Americans have been mixed at best.

A long line of court rulings now mandate careful scrutiny when lawyers betray any intent to scrub a jury of racial or ethnic minorities, and in my experience few big city prosecutors would make use of racially discriminatory measures even if they thought they could get away with it. Race is just one of many factors that color a person's life experience, and seasoned lawyers know it is rubbish to assume that black jurors will inevitably feel more sympathy toward black defendants.

But even where courts are dedicated to boosting African-American representation on juries -- as they unquestionably are in Detroit, where many of the judges, lawyers and administrators laboring to solve the problem are themselves African American -- progress has been slow.

Some of the obstacles to greater black participation -- disproportionate rates of relocation, poverty and functional illiteracy -- are stubbornly intractable. And the lack of proprietary interest in the judicial system is a self-perpetuating cycle:

The fewer blacks participate in rite of jury duty, the more alienated African Americans are from the judicial system; the greater the alienation, the weaker the sense of obligation to the judicial process.

Yet nothing is more dangerous to that process than the conviction that some citizens have neither a stake in its success nor a meaningful voice in its implementation.